


Hard Edges

by lick



Series: No Easy Distance [2]
Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Gore, Dr. Mensah's POV, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:15:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29233638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lick/pseuds/lick
Summary: It was easy to look back and think about what Ayda could've done differently, but it was harder to look forward and think about what to do next. After Bharadwaj was injured in the field, Ayda realized she needed to do better by their SecUnit.--Or: Dr. Mensah's POV during chapters one and two ofAll Systems Red.
Relationships: Arada/Overse
Series: No Easy Distance [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2146596
Comments: 73
Kudos: 115





	1. Hard Edges

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a sequel to Demo and Inspection, but you can read them in either order.

Ayda was beginning to wonder if her heart would ever slow down. The whole flight back to the habitat it had raced wildly. She had pushed the hopper to top speed, ignoring the safety alert the controls flashed when she maneuvered without braking. In a normal situation, if one of the others had flown like this, she’d have to be a hardass and tell them the hopper wasn’t a toy. Today, it was all she could do. If she’d had someone else fly while she joined the others in trying to help Bharadwaj, she would have just gotten in the way. She had nothing more than basic medic training. Had a hard time stomaching the sight of blood, if she was honest with herself, although she’d long learned to suck it up with that particular discomfort. So the best thing she could do to help was get everyone back to the habitat, and thus get Bharadwaj into the MedSystem as fast as she could.

Now she sat on the far side of medical, next to Volescu on the bench and across the room from the MedSystem platform listening to the mechanical hums of the platform as it worked on putting Bharadwaj back together. Ayda had led a lot of surveys in her day, to planets that had been evaluated as far riskier than this uninhabited world, with its fluffy fauna and gentle subtropical climate. She’d seen broken limbs, bites from strange poisonous animals, and falls. But nothing like this. This was the first time on any survey trip that a member of her team had been injured so badly. Bharadwaj’s environmental suit had soaked clean through with blood. The others had cut it off of her before they’d put her in the MedSystem. Ayda had been the one who picked it up off the floor and put it in the recycler. None of the others had been looking, so they hadn’t seen her hands shake.

Volescu was alright, at least. As alright as someone recovering from a panic attack could be. Overse was holding one of his hands in both of hers, rubbing circles on his knuckles with her thumbs and gently talking him through a deep breathing technique. His color was coming back, but he still occasionally trembled. There wasn’t a scratch on him. The others had cleared out already, back to the hub, but Ayda wasn’t going anywhere until she knew he was okay.

Ayda knew that it was a lucky thing that he wasn’t injured. She placed her hand on Volescu’s shoulder, which shook as he took another deep, uneasy breath. Volescu could hardly hold himself upright now, yet the SecUnit had talked him up the side of a crater. The hostile hadn’t hurt a hair on his head. It would’ve been so easy to lose them both today. There were so many questions swirling through her head already. Megafauna were all supposed to be listed in the survey package. That creature hadn’t been. If she’d had any idea of what lurked beneath the craters, she wouldn’t have let a single member of the party get near them.

The MedSystem interface monitoring Volescu chimed. It had prescribed a mild sedative to help him sleep. Ayda asked, “Volescu, would you like to get some rest?”

“Yes,” he said weakly. Ayda got up and took the medication from the med supply cabinet. In the tiny med sink, she filled a cup with water to help him swallow it down. Once he was medicated and dozing, they turned down the lights in Medical and walked quietly into the hall but not moving down it to join the others in the mess.

“Overse, are you alright?” Ayda asked.

Overse was always quieter and more serious than Arada, and her moods were harder to read. Tonight, Ayda thought she seemed weary. Ayda couldn’t blame her. “I’ll be okay. It’s just me,” Overse said.

“It’s okay that you feel that way,” Ayda said. “It might take a while to fade, but it will. You did very well today. You did an excellent job with Bharadwaj in the hopper, she wouldn’t have made it if not for you. I’m proud of you.”

Overse tightened her jaw, and said, “Dr. Mensah, I’m worried about the SecUnit. I know they’re supposed to regenerate, but it was really bad. I wanted to perform first aid on it too, but I had to focus on Bharadwaj.”

Ayda searched Overse’s face, pausing before she replied. When had she last seen the SecUnit? It must have been when they were still outside. It hadn’t followed them to Medical. “I’m sure it will be okay,” Ayda assured her.

Overse seemed far away. “I saw its bones. Not just metal framework,” she said. “Bones.”

“Let’s join the others in the mess, Overse,” Ayda said. “The unit sends a status update to HubSystem whenever it activates its cubicle. We’ll take a look at it in there.”

“Alright,” Overse said. Ayda took her hand and led her down the hall, through the hatch into the next structure where the mess was. Ayda knew from the feed that the rest of the crew had gathered there after clearing out of medical once Bharadwaj had been put in the MedSystem.

It smelled like food and tea inside. The rest of the team was sitting at their usual spots around the table, the big display surface playing back video. Overse slid away and went to sit in her usual spot next to Arada, who had clearly prepared dinner for Overse. Arada set the hot meal pack and a steaming mug of tea down in front of Overse after she sat down. Ayda took her seat at the head of the table. She felt too wired to eat right now, so she turned her attention to the video.

The metadata in the bottom right corner of the display told her it was playback from Volescu’s helmet field camera. The top half of the screen was shaded by the upturned rock he had huddled under. She glanced around the table and noticed the others were watching with rapt expressions, but they had clearly already watched the recording at least once. Arada and Ratthi both had touch interfaces sitting on the table, and were taking notes on them using styluses without taking their eyes off the recording, probably their observations about the hostile creature.

A white streak tore across the screen, moving so fast that it was hard to distinguish, but Ayda knew it had to be the SecUnit. It leapt towards the creature, but the good view was lost when Volescu had moved and the recording was mostly obscured by him covering his head. The audio was noisy and staticky, picking up rocks cracking and the sound of projectile weapon fire.

Seconds later, there was the heavy footsteps of the armored SecUnit. Volescu had moved his head to look at it, and it told Volescu to come with it. Volescu didn’t respond, and after a couple seconds Ayda watched the face plate and helmet retract cleanly into the armor, like it hadn’t been there at all. She had seen the unit’s face before, of course, on Port FreeCommerce. It looked different in this video though. On Port FreeCommerce, she hadn’t seen anything but its eyes move. Its mouth had been set into a straight line, with furrowed brows. Now though, it was smiling a little, and its voice changed as it tried to coax Volescu up. Before, they had mainly communicated with the SecUnit on the feed, following the company’s instructions. They had also heard it speak in the field and during their security briefing, but the sound of its voice was very different in this recording. Warmer, deeper, and with softer inflections. She wondered if this was self-generated and all that they had heard before had been an uploaded canned response.

She checked her own touch interface, which had synced with the video to playback the command feed that had run during the incident. At the time, she had been able to mute HubSystem and the other feeds for everyone, but hadn’t been able to focus on much else except flying.

Volescu’s footage became jerky as they scaled up the side of the crater. The ground was not solid; it was covered in sand and small rocks that shifted under their weight, and Volescu kept losing his footing. The camera jolted whenever he did. Their SecUnit wasn’t looking at Volescu anymore at that point, but it kept glancing back to check on him. When Volescu started to falter, it asked, “What are you going to do when the survey is over?”

Volescu started moving again. He said, “I am going to go home and be with my partners.”

It glanced at Volescu again, and then asked, “What are their names?”

Volescu had turned his head a little, and his camera got a better angle of their SecUnit’s other shoulder, the one that had been injured. Ayda hadn’t really gotten a look at its damage at all. She’d been too busy with flying to notice it during the incident, and as soon as they’d arrived back at the habitat it had disappeared. But Volescu’s camera had a clear view of the damage from the back, which seemed less severe than the front, but was still bad. The armor had broken clean off around the shoulder, revealing a gruesome wound. There was only a little blood, but a light green fluid dripped out. Volescu turned his head towards the rim of the crater again, and the wound wasn’t as visible anymore. Volescu answered, “I have three. They’re Amir, Evora, and Tiya.”

Their SecUnit checked on Volescu again, and then back towards the bottom of the crater. Volescu grabbed its shoulder to get footing over a steep edge. When he let go, their SecUnit asked, “Do you have children?”

Volescu named all of his children, and then when prompted by the unit, listed their ages. Ayda felt a little uneasy watching the footage, the way everyone else was nearly silent. She glanced around the table and realized that a lot of the others were now trying to surreptitiously gauge her reaction. The questions were a little stilted, and it didn’t really follow a natural flow of conversation, but Ayda couldn’t deny that they were effective in keeping Volescu from freezing up again. She glanced at the record of the MedSystem’s feed running on her touch screen. She wasn’t sure which possibility made her feel worse—was this a scripted protocol, a program some other human had wrote in case of a situation like this, or was this coming from the unit, trying to figure out how to get both humans to safety when it could only carry one? All of the instructions the emergency feed was sending to the unit were related to managing Bharadwaj’s injuries and minimizing further blood loss. There wasn’t anything about extracting Volescu at all. Nothing was commanding it to ask questions like this. It had done so itself.

Ayda knew where her feeling of unease came from now. It was that guilty feeling she got in her gut when she knew she’d done something wrong, had hurt another person. The others hadn’t known, they’d probably thought of it merely as a robot, but she had seen its human face before, had recognized something in its eyes and she had… forgotten. Let herself settle easily into the farce of it being a bot. There was no easy distance between their SecUnit and humanity in her mind now, not when she had seen it understand and respond to Volescu’s fear, not when she had seen its flesh torn open.

She pressed one of her hands to her brow, pulling on the skin of her forehead and cheek as she watched the rest of the recording. They cleared the rim of the crater, and Volescu immediately dropped to his knees. He was hyperventilating.

Their SecUnit looked at him, but couldn’t seem to lean over while holding Bharadwaj, although Ayda thought it seemed like it wanted to. It said, “Dr. Volescu, the others are only a few minutes away. But I think it would be safer if we were a little bit further from the edge.”

Volescu had agreed, but stumbled trying to get back on his feet. Their SecUnit turned, offering the crook of the elbow on its undamaged arm to Volescu again, as it had in the crater, and Volescu grasped it with his hand, letting it tow him a bit further away from the edge.

One of the others paused the recording. They were all looking at her now. She felt the urge to say something with all their eyes on her, and what came out of her mouth was: “Wow.”

She was really impressed, actually. The unit’s physicality wasn’t surprising, but its behavior in an emergency was. She knew that it could take action unprompted (against the advice of the company for “first time clients” she had selected the HubSystem mode that allowed the unit the most “free reign” (which wasn’t even a good euphemism for free will, it didn’t make her feel any better) in directing its actions.) She thought it just made sense to do it that way. It was hard enough to get the rest of them to the assessment sites, she didn’t need another person to micromanage. But even though she had picked a mode that allowed the unit to make decisions like that, she was surprised by the decisions it had made, and how effective they were.

Pin-Lee, Arada, and Ratthi all started to talk, but it was Ratthi who actually finished his question, “Did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That it’s a person! I thought it was a bot. I thought it just had some neural tissue inside a regular bot carapace. I didn’t know it made expressions and had flesh and could… ugh!” he trailed off, unable to find the words to finish the thought.

“When they showed me the SecUnit at the deployment centre, it wasn’t wearing armor, so yes, I did see its face,” Ayda said.

Everyone was quiet for a short moment, until Gurathin said, “We were treating it like a thing. It was riding with the cargo.”

“I knew those motherfuckers on Port FreeCommerce were lying about it not being sentient!” Pin-Lee seethed, slamming her hand on the table next to her plate, so the scraps of her food left behind bounced. “Those corporate shitsmears are the lowest of the low. Creating people to live a life like that? It’s sick!”

Ayda thought she should be angry too, but mostly she felt numb. Angry with herself, if anything, because she hadn’t been ignorant like the others. She’d already known, kept it to herself, and had forgotten. She’d put it on the freest setting and just turned it loose. She gave it assignments, sure, instructed it which group to go with when they split up, but that was mostly it for orders, aside from asking it to give her data from SecSystem occasionally. With it acting autonomously, just doing whatever it did to run security, it had faded into the background, and she’d barely thought of it.

“Leave it to the Corporation Rim to innovate on slavery,” Ayda said.

“Dr. Mensah, you said you were going to check the unit’s report,” Overse reminded her quietly.

“Yes, right,” Ayda said, tapping her fingers on the console to bring up the menu. She flipped into the SecSystem screen and accessed the most recent status update. It had just activated its cubicle a few minutes ago. Ayda frowned. They’d been back at the habitat for at least an hour now, what had it been doing? She leafed through the data, noting that the unit’s performance reliability was dropping at an increasing rate. “Oh my word,” she said aloud, reading the damage summary that the cubicle had pulled. She could tell from the video that it had been bad, but put into those terms…

She rose to her feet. “I’m going to check on it,” she said, hurrying out of the room. Gurathin was right, they had treated it like a thing, but she was the worst of all because she was the one who should’ve known better. She couldn’t change the past, but the least she could do in this moment was to talk to it and make sure it was okay. Like she and Overse had done with Volescu in Medical.

She hurried down the hall and through the hatch out of the living space. The entrance to the security ready room was near the door to the ground vehicle shelter. She stuck her hand in the biometric scan, which read her fingerprints to let her in. Because of the weapons, only certain members of the team were allowed in here, but she didn’t think any of them had actually come in at all, because on the few assessments where they had carried field weapons, their SecUnit had packed them up with the rest of the supplies for them.

The door opened, and what she saw just made her feel worse. The SecUnit armor was in pieces, and scattered haphazardly over the floor, mixed with torn pieces of the suit-skin it wore underneath the armor. It was stained with blood and the green fluid she’d seen on the video, concentrated on the chest plate, the gloves, and the shoulder area, but every piece had some. On a countertop, a large first aid kit lay haphazardly open, contents lying jumbled around it. The cubicle was active, softly glowing, and it made a low hum that was just barely perceptible to her. Here and there on the floor, there was dribbles of blood and larger drops of the green fluid.

When they’d gotten back, after it had disappeared and the rest of them had gone to Medical, it had come here alone, and tended to its own wounds. That was so wrong that it hurt to think about. She wished that it had come with them to Medical for first aid, or that it had asked for help. It wasn’t like Arada, Overse, and Gurathin would’ve all needed to attend to Bharadwaj when they were already back at the shelter. One of the medics could’ve done it. But none of them had even thought of it in the moment, none of them had noticed until it was gone, so why would it have asked them for help?

She reminded herself that she came here for a reason. She walked up to the cubicle, staring at the door, and faltered. Had it been deactivated for repair? Maybe it wouldn’t answer. She steeled herself, and then knocked gently on the door.

After a moment of silence, a voice came from inside. “Uh, yes?” In any other situation, she might’ve found it funny, how much it sounded like Amena did when Ayda knocked on her door when her daughter didn’t want to talk to anyone. Nothing was funny right now though.

Ayda hooked her hand in the release and opened the door. Her immediate reaction was surprise at how small the space inside was. She wasn’t face to face with the unit. The floor of the cubicle was raised from the floor of the ready room, so she was eye level with its chest. It was ensconced from behind in a loose, upholstery-like plastic material, that looked like it offered little padding. Most of its torso was covered by the silver foil of a survival blanket. (The survival blanket must’ve been what it had rummaged around in the first aid kit for. It didn’t look very warm, and certainly not comforting, and now that she thought about it, this whole room felt like it wasn’t heated as much as the living space.) On its chest she saw the edges of another wound. The wound on the shoulder was more visible only half covered by the blanket and oh, she understood what Overse meant about bones now.

She tipped her head back to make eye contact, and saw that it looked confused, maybe a little frightened? Okay. She would get straight to the point then. She asked, “Are you alright? I saw your status report.”

It needled for a moment, and then gripped the foil and hitched it up higher, covering a wound on its ribcage. “Fine,” it finally said, not making eye contact, instead looking somewhere over her shoulder.

“Fine?” Ayda questioned. She found that hard to believe and couldn’t help frowning. She remembered the status report, the information that had made her stand up and hurry out of the mess in the first place. “The report said you lost 20 percent of your body mass.” That didn’t sound like someone who was fine.

It answered immediately, “It’ll grow back.”

Ayda knew that. The brochures said that the units could self-repair from most damage in less than a day. It had noted that regrowing organic components could take a lot of energy, and if they noticed power failures elsewhere in the habit during a regrow cycle they needed to run a diagnostic on the power system.

“I know, but still,” Ayda said, trailing off. She came here to make sure it was okay. Maybe to comfort it? She wanted to. But as she looked at it, the situation felt stranger and stranger. People weren’t supposed to rest in places like this. She wanted to haul it out and drag it to Medical, hook it up to the MedSystem in there and give it a real blanket. A soft, heavy one. They had plenty.

But looking at their SecUnit, she just knew it wouldn’t accept that. It was also pretty easy to tell that it wanted her to go away. She was making it feel worse. She decided to try and make the rest of it quick. She thought back to the mess, how the recording had affected everyone, made them question their behavior. She bent the truth a little bit, even though she knew it could run back the feeds to know what really happened, if it wanted to. She told it the others had been impressed.

It seemed uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond. It said, “It’s part of the emergency med instructions, calming victims.” It tugged the survival blanket tighter around its torso, making it crinkle. Its hands were so tight the knuckles were white.

It was obvious that their SecUnit didn’t want her looking at its body, so she tilted her head a little higher, looking at its eyes. It didn’t maintain eye contact, and broke it almost immediately, gazing over her head. She had checked the MedSystem feed though, and she knew what it had said. “Yes, but the MedSystem was prioritizing Bharadwaj and didn’t check Volescu’s vital signs. It didn’t take into account the shock of the event, and it expected him to be able to leave the scene on his own.”

Their SecUnit looked uncomfortable. It pressed its lips tight, and said, “It’s part of my job, not to listen to the System feeds when they…” it trailed off, then finally settled on, “make mistakes.”

“Alright,” Ayda said. She knew when she wasn’t wanted somewhere, but the situation still made her uncomfortable. She looked over their SecUnit again, noting the visible edge of the wound on its shoulder which foamed pink with wound sealant near a metal joint and how sad and uncomfortable the survival blanket looked. But if it wanted her to go away, then she would do that. She wished it wanted something else though. “I’ll see you in eight hours,” she told it, and asked it to send an alert if it needed anything. She hoped that it would ask for a real blanket. She had a feeling it would ask for nothing.

She let the door slide closed and looked around the room again. She shivered, feeling the chill in the air. This was a place for things, not for people. There was no chairs, only tall tables and counter tops, meant for a standing individual. It was dim, with no soft surfaces, only hard edges.

It made a part of her ache, thinking of their SecUnit alone in here, standing upright monitoring security feeds while the rest of them lounged around in the mess and in the hub, laughing and chatting. She felt like there was little she could do to help it, nothing she could say. But the least they could do was welcome it into the fold, into the group. Let it know it wasn’t relegated to this sad space.

She was going to talk to the others about that. She hoped it would help.


	2. Hazardous Encounters

The morning did not bring clarity, relief, or comfort. Instead, it brought new concerns in with it.

Ayda doubted anyone had gotten a good night’s sleep. Bharadwaj and Volescu were both sedated. It was unlikely Bharadwaj was going to wake up at all today, but Ayda thought that when Volescu did rouse he wouldn’t feel very rested. Arada and Overse’s quarters were near Ayda’s, and she had heard one of them pacing during the night. When she accessed the feed she saw that Pin-Lee had been working, not sleeping, and had sent her a couple of documents, the latest one coming two hours previously.

Ayda had gone to speak with their SecUnit the night before on an impulse. She thought that maybe she had wanted to thank it or comfort it, something. The encounter had left her feeling worse than she had before.

After Ayda had left the security ready room the night before and given herself five minutes to feel angry before she had to go back to being calm and in charge, Ayda told everyone to get to bed. This was out of the ordinary for them, but she thought if she hadn’t ordered them to get some rest, they would’ve stayed in the mess all night staring into cups of tea and contemplating mortality. That was a fine past time, sure, if they were at home. Not in the middle of a survey trip. About seven hours had passed since, and morning light shone through her porthole into her cabin. The planet had a short day-night cycle compared to the 27 hour day on Preservation, only lasting 21 hours and 33 minutes. The effect confused her body’s circadian rhythm; she usually slept for ten hours at home and woke at sunrise. The lost six hours meant she never had enough time to get all her work in the daylight done and still get a good night’s sleep before the sun rose again.

During the night she’d tossed and turned, dozing for brief periods only to wake up and stare at the ceiling again. The guilty and angry feeling in her gut made it hard to rest. She didn’t think that she could watch as someone packed the SecUnit back up in a box at the end of contract and send it back to the Corporation Rim. Without it, she had no doubt that yesterday she would’ve lost two people who were very important to her. How could she send that person back to whatever half-life awaited it after this contract? She had her principles, and before she had crumpled in the face of a corporate machine. Would her principles mean anything at all if at the end of this she turned around and went back to her comfortable home, and tried to forget how she had come face-to-face with the most invasive type of slavery the Corporation Rim had to offer?

She got up and went to the mess, in search of tea. She hadn’t eaten since before the _incident_ , and she supposed she should be feeling hungry by now, but she wasn’t. She was sitting down at the table, sipping her black tea and waiting for wakefulness to creep in when Gurathin arrived.

He had dark circles under his eyes today, and his hair was ruffled and unwashed. “Good morning,” she greeted, watching him patter around with a meal packet, tearing it open with his nails and tossing it into the heater.

“Morning,” he replied blearily, and Ayda decided that maybe it’d be best to let him drink his tea too before pursuing further conversation. She activated her touch interface, and began checking on everyone’s feeds. Pin-Lee wasn’t the only one who had been working during the night. She poked around in the bio team’s document storage and saw that Arada and Ratthi had been working on compiling their separate notes on the megafauna for at least two hours past when she told everyone to go to bed.

Ayda checked SecSystem next. The company’s system package was designed around using a SecUnit to interface with SecSystem, and accessing it directly was clunky because of the way it was designed. She was too concerned about their SecUnit’s injuries to wait around for it to wake up and receive a direct alert, so she dug around until she found the folder where continual status updates were stored. (The report she accessed the night before, generated after it activated the cubicle was easier to get ahold of.) She opened the folder and saw that the last update had been uploaded about fifteen minutes previously.

> Status: In Stasis (no change)
> 
> Performance Reliability Status: 71% (+10% last access)
> 
> Supply: 100% (no change)
> 
> Mass: 187.4kg (+2% last access)
> 
> Alerts: None (no change)
> 
> Update Status: Systems Up To Date (no change)

A chart was appended with the text data, showing in more detail the progress the cubicle had made in regenerating the lost flesh. It looked like the bulk of the muscle had regrown already, but that the skin was still compromised. She noted on the clock that the security interdict it had set the night before would be expiring in the hour. Based on the progress report, she didn’t think the unit would be able to finish its repair cycle in that time, so she tacked on another four hours to the interdict. It wasn’t like she expected anyone to actually _want_ to get back to fieldwork today. There was plenty to be done at home.

Ayda went to sip her tea again, and then realized she’d finished it. She poured more hot water from the tap into her mug, but decided to go through the hatch and sit down in the main hub instead of the mess because the smell of the food Gurathin was heating up was starting to make her stomach turn, and she wanted access to a better display surface anyways.

Pin-Lee was already in the hub, using one of the main displays, her brows knitted together in concentration.

“Did you get any sleep?” Ayda asked her.

Pin-Lee ignored the question, and said, “I think something is wrong with the survey package.”

Ayda’s stomach flipped. She slid down into the seat next to Pin-Lee, and looked at the information on the display. “What do you see?”

“Well, it seems like the data has been altered. Some of the wording in certain sections is odd and doesn’t match the language used in the rest of the report. I highlighted this section here in the report on fauna, but there’s other linguistic irregularities in the section on environmental hazards, and seismic observations. It’s not proof of anything, but it’s a little strange, don’t you think?”

“I do,” Ayda said. “When Gurathin joins us, I’ll ask him to take a look at the portions you highlighted. Maybe he’ll be able to parse the data better.”

“It’s worth a try.” Pin-Lee said. She pursed her lips, and then said, “Have you got something on your mind?”

“What makes you say that?” Ayda asked.

“No, it’s not your demeanor… I just figured you would,” Pin-Lee paused, and then added, “after everything that happened.”

Ayda sighed. Pin-Lee knew her well. “I’ve been feeling conflicted. On Port FreeCommerce, when we tried to get the bond agreement terms altered, I told them I thought the production of constructs was immoral. But once we were stuck with it, I just put it in the back of my mind. Now, if it weren’t for that construct, two of my closest friends would probably be dead.”

“It was easier to forget before I saw how human it really was. And that makes me feel like shit,” Pin-Lee said. Ayda thought she was exactly right.

She decided to put it all out there. The thoughts that had kept her up the night before. “Preservation is a small polity, and there’s not much we can do to influence the Corporation Rim. But I think at the very least, we can and should help SecUnit.”

Pin-Lee looked pensive. “There are definitely options,” she said.

“My family and I have quite a bit of hard currency stashed,” Ayda said. “We got a good cut from some of Thiago’s language packs being licensed by a corporation a few years back, and we haven’t touched it. I think I could probably afford to buy the unit’s contract from the company.”

“I have some too,” Pin-Lee said quickly, “from when I still did out-of-system legal consultations.”

“It’s not money I’m asking for,” Ayda said, and then reconsidered. She thought she had enough, but she didn’t know, did she? “Well, not yet,” she amended, with a chuckle, and Pin-Lee laughed. “I’m more concerned about what happens when we get it out of Corporation Rim territory. Preservation’s legal code has holes big enough to fly a transport through when it comes to constructs. I’m worried there will be a legal battle, and it won’t be allowed into Preservation.”

It was kind of by accident, that it was like that. In Preservation territory, it was illegal to use cloned human material for anything except for medical procedures. Production of human-bot constructs was also explicitly illegal, but there was nothing that made buying one outside of the Preservation Alliance illegal. But why would anyone want to spend so much currency on a thing that they couldn’t own once they brought it home? In short, the issue of ‘what happens to a bot-human construct in Preservation space’ had never been legally tested.

Pin-Lee tapped her stylus thoughtfully on her touch interface. “It would be tricky,” she said, “I think the easier argument to make in front of a judge would be that it’s like a high-level bot, and you will be its guardian. Which I don’t think is a bad idea, really. Its life must be so controlled cur—”

“What the hell?” Gurathin had wandered in, with a fresh cup of hot tea. “You can’t seriously be thinking of _taking that thing_ —”

Ayda interrupted him. “We were just speaking theoretically,” she said. A lie. “Besides, once we’re off the planet and the survey is over, what I do isn’t your concern.” A truth.

“Dr. Mensah, what the Corporation Rim does to them is wrong, but I don’t think you’re thinking clearly about this.” Gurathin sat down, shaking his head angrily. “That SecUnit is a person who’s been tortured, who has no reference to a human moral code, who we know nothing about. It’s not safe.”

“Gurathin, not now.” Ayda said. She would have to think about those things, yes. But there were weeks left on this survey trip. She had plenty of time to make a plan. “We will talk about it later. For now, Pin-Lee, can you please show Gurathin which parts of the survey package you were concerned about?”

“Fine,” Gurathin grumbled. “Just remember, it was built to hurt people.”

“Gurathin,” Pin-Lee said softly. “Please.”

Gurathin scoffed, but just then Arada, Overse, and Ratthi arrived from the mess, toting meal packs and coffee _,_ so the hub got a lot noisier. Ayda watched Gurathin close his eyes to review the selected data. Ayda chided Arada and Ratthi a bit for working while they were supposed to be asleep.

After a few minutes, Gurathin opened his eyes and said, “I can’t find any problems with the survey package, but this isn’t a file format that I’m very familiar with, so I can’t be sure.”

Ayda thought about it for a moment, and then decided, “I’ll ask SecUnit to take a look at the data too. It couldn’t be very effective at surveilling us for the company if it can’t analyze this data,” she said, jokingly.

The company’s surveillance and datamining was a sore spot for everyone, and it made tensions run a bit high. When it came to things she couldn’t do anything to fix, Ayda often turned to humor to help cool tempers. This was definitely one of those situations. Ratthi and Overse both laughed weakly, but Gurathin just looked irritated. Ayda sent the command through HubSystem.

Ayda respected Gurathin, and when it came to all things Corporation Rim, she trusted him. He was the only person on the team who had grown up in the Rim. But in this particular case, she thought he was wrong. She didn’t have any evidence for why. Just the way she had seen it looking at her curiously in the deployment centre. The way it talked to Volescu in the crater. The way it had been skittish towards her in its cubicle. She didn’t think it held any malice for them.

It was time for another cup of tea. She left the others in the hub to trudge back to the mess to get it. While she was in there, she grabbed a couple crackers. She still didn’t feel hungry, but she knew that she really had to eat something.

She brought it all back to the main hub, where the others had settled down a little bit, gazing seriously at their various interfaces. She sat back down next to Pin-Lee, who was examining another section of the hazard info package on the main display.

Ayda dismissed an alert from the SecSystem that said the unit had been reactivated after coming out of stasis, and she looked over Pin-Lee’s shoulder. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Well, say somebody actually hacked HubSystem and altered the report, so we wouldn’t be aware of the hazard yesterday,” Pin-Lee said, making a sour face. “Ignoring the fact that we have no idea _why_ someone would even want to do that, it’s unlikely that the only thing they would change would be that one warning section on fauna, right?”

Ayda took a moment to think about it. “There’s a lot of things that could be dangerous if we didn’t know to watch out for them. Other types of large, predatory fauna. Terrain hazards. Even weather events.”

Gurathin said, “If someone wanted to hurt us, I think it would be targeted. Why delete a bunch of information, and make it more obvious that something is wrong, when you can delete a couple of pieces of information that might actually be important?”

Arada bit her lip, looking up from her console. “You don’t think someone did this trying to hurt us, do you, Dr. Mensah?”

“I’m not sure. We just don’t know enough yet,” Ayda said. The others welled up in agitated noise, talking over each other. Ayda held up a hand, her expression flat, and they quieted down. She said, “If we get some work done today and investigate further, then we can start coming up with ideas.”

Ayda felt heavy with exhaustion. She wished she’d had some more sleep. Pin-Lee let her take control of the main display, so Ayda paged back to the index of their info package, thinking hard. She thought Gurathin was probably right that a hacker would’ve targeted specific information, but how had they done it? She didn’t have enough information to speculate why. She pressed her forehead against the cool plastic console, ignoring the noise from the others talking. She felt like they were talking entirely too much and entirely too loudly.

A soft, pleasant voice cut through the din, stirring her attention. “I’m your SecUnit,” it said.

Right, she had sent orders for it to report to her. She suddenly regretted it, because when she’d done that, she was thinking about things like _being nice_ and _making it feel included_ , but now she was in a mood and doubting her ability to do either. She took a deep breath and tried to quash her irritation.

She turned away from the console, and saw that it was dressed in a crew uniform. Seeing as its armor had been wrecked the day before, this wasn’t a surprise to her, but apparently it was to everyone else, because the five of them all looked uneasy. It had adopted the stiff posture it had kept at the deployment centre, but it seemed uncomfortable, its gazing shifting wearily between the different members of the team and the floor quickly.

The others were staring at it. Ayda remembered how uncomfortable her gaze had made it the night before, how it kept trying to hide itself from her with the survival blanket. She wondered if that pressure had just multiplied by six for it with the whole group staring. The immediate solution to get their eyes off of it was to get them back on their interfaces, so Ayda told it, “We were checking the hazard report for this region to try to learn why that thing wasn’t listed under hazardous fauna. Pin-Lee thinks the data has been altered. Can you examine the report for us?”

It said, in that pleasant tone that Ayda associated with customer service in the Corporation Rim, “Yes, Dr. Mensah.” It blinked and its eyes became unfocused. The others poked at their interfaces, and Ayda navigated to the specific page for their region on the main display. After a short moment, it said, “You’re right.” It blinked again and then looked at her to say, “Something’s been deleted from the warnings and the section on fauna.”

Pin-Lee groused, “God assfucking dammit.”

Overse complained, “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”

Ratthi threw his hands in the air, and Ayda only half paid attention to their conversation for a moment, peering at the data that the unit had highlighted to send to her feed, showing where something had been removed. She thought Arada’s theory about the creature’s niche was interesting. “It would explain what the craters are doing there,” she said. “That would be one anomaly out of the way at least.” The least currently relevant anomaly, but it was something.

Pin-Lee wasn’t very interested in biology at the moment either. She said, “But who removed that subreport?” She then whipped her head around to look directly at the SecUnit. “Can the HubSystem be hacked?”

It didn’t react to Pin-Lee’s movement, except for a subtle widening of its eyes that Ayda only noticed because she was looking for it. Ayda didn’t expect a useful answer to that question. From her prior experience with the bond company, she expected something along the lines of, ‘Of course not, company systems provide the utmost in security,’ but what it actually said was, “As far as I know, it’s possible. But it’s more likely the report was damaged before you received the survey package.”

“Seriously?” Gurathin complained, “How much did we pay for this shit?”

“It’s the Corporation Rim,” Ratthi said, “The higher the prices, the shittier the stuff.”

Ayda tuned out the complaining. She was still privately surprised that their SecUnit didn’t defend the company. She said, “Gurathin, maybe you and Pin-Lee can figure out what happened.” She turned to the SecUnit, getting an idea. “In the meantime, does the DeltFall Group have the same survey package we do?”

It looked skeptical and answered a bit slower than it usually did. It settled on, “Probably.”

Probably was better than a hard no, at least. She thought the best thing to do was contact the DeltFall group. Being on the other end of the planet, there was no guarantee that DeltFall’s package would have data relevant to them, but making sure their weather warnings on a planet prone to tropical cyclones all over its surface weren’t damaged was important. She started delegating.

When she had set the others off on their tasks, the SecUnit asked her softly, “Dr. Mensah, do you need me for anything else?”

She said, “No, I’ll call if we have any questions.” It had been very helpful by confirming Pin-Lee’s suspicions, but she couldn’t think of anything else to ask it. But she didn’t want to dismiss it either, she realized. She said, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

Its carefully neutral expression cracked. Its eyes widened, jaw dropped, and eyebrows rose. It looked like that was the worst idea it had ever heard, like she’d just suggested they hop back into that crater from yesterday to investigate.

Ayda scrambled. She knew it seemed anxious around the group, but she hadn’t expected such a negative reaction to the invitation. Hurriedly, she tacked on, “Or not, you know, whatever you like.”

It closed its mouth and pressed its lips together, seeming to be steeling itself. Then, it said, “I need to check the perimeter.” It turned on its heels so fast it was nearly a blur, and it was out the hatch before Ayda could say anything else.

“Oh,” she finally said, once it was gone.

“Do you think that went well?” Gurathin said sarcastically.

“No, I don’t suppose it did,” Ayda said, giving him a look. Gurathin held up his hands in deference.

“Why do you think it did that?” Pin-Lee said, her face pinched and worried.

“I think it’s shy,” Ratthi said. “The Rim being the way it is, maybe no one has ever talked to it like that before.”

Shy. Ayda mulled it over, and she thought that maybe it really was that simple. The stolen glances at the deployment centre. The way it broke eye contact as soon as she tried to make it. Hidden its body from her eyes. Run away from an invitation. Their SecUnit was shy.

No one else said anything. Ratthi looked uneasily around the group, and then said, “Maybe we should talk to it about what happened? Make sure it’s okay. Let it know we’re not upset.”

Overse perked up a little. “Maybe if we aren’t all looking at it, it won’t be so nervous, and will be more comfortable talking,” she said.

“I don’t think that would help at all,” Arada said. “I think talking to us is what made it uncomfortable.”

Ayda thought back to the conversation in the security ready room the night before. “No,” she said firmly. “We are not going to try to talk to it about it.”

Ratthi looked a little dejected. Ayda gave him a side eye, which he pretended not to notice, just pushing his sleeves up and laughing nervously. “You’re the one in charge,” he said.

Ayda moved the conversation on. “I think maybe I got a bit ahead of myself. We are all grateful to SecUnit for yesterday, and we want to show it.” The others gave their assent, and Ayda looked at Gurathin. When their eyes met, he looked weary, but he nodded once. “Obviously, inviting it to stay with us wasn’t the way.”

Pin-Lee said quietly, “I just don’t want to make things worse for it.”

A silence hung in the air, as they all thought it over. Ayda tried to imagine herself in the unit’s shoes, but she couldn’t. Its point of view and life experience were too foreign to her, and she couldn’t think of where to begin.

Finally Ayda said, “Well, we’ve learned a bit. It doesn’t like making eye contact, and you guys weren’t exactly subtle about looking at it.” They exchanged guilty looks amongst themselves.

“It’s probably okay with working with us,” Arada spoke up, “I’ve never noticed any issues in the field.”

“Yes,” Pin-Lee agreed, “Maybe a social situation is just too far outside of its comfort zone.”

Ayda said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to push it any farther than it wants to go. But from now on, when we go out, it’s a member of the team, one of us.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Beta read by [FlipSpring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlipSpring/pseuds/FlipSpring). 
> 
> This is going to be a series of fics of missing scenes from Dr. Mensah's POV. I have more ideas.
> 
> indigo.tumblr.com


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